Service and Support as a Business | KPIs that Tell the Big Picture

Service and Support as a Business | KPIs that Tell the Big Picture

Most IT professionals are familiar with the operational metrics of service and support. KPI’s such as cost per ticket, first contact resolution rate, and mean time to resolve are well understood and almost universally applied. Yet even support organizations that have mastered these metrics and achieved a degree of operational success often struggle to gain visibility and credibility within their own enterprise. The all-too-common result is that service and support operates at a subsistence level, and lacks the necessary resources to deliver effective levels of support.

The business world offers a potential solution to this dilemma. When a business is not performing well, investments in the business dry up because there is no reasonable expectation of earning a profit. By contrast, businesses that are profitable receive adequate funding because they are able to attract investment capital seeking a positive return. So what would happen if IT service and support organizations began operating more like businesses, and were able to attract funding and other resources based upon their profitability?

In this article I outline an approach for managing IT service and support as a business. Additionally, I propose a handful of business metrics that can be used to quantify and communicate the profitability of service and support. Finally, I discuss the need to adopt a paradigm shift for any service and support organization that aspires to realize the benefits of operating as a true business.

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About Author

Jeffrey Rumburg

Jeff Rumburg is a co-founder and Managing Partner of MetricNet, where he is responsible for global strategy, product development, and financial operations for the company. As a leading expert in benchmarking and re-engineering, Mr. Rumburg authored a best selling book on benchmarking, and has been retained as a benchmarking expert by such well known companies as American Express, Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, IBM, and Sony.
Mr. Rumburg was honored in 2014 by receiving the Ron Muns Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the IT Service and Support industry. Prior to co-founding MetricNet, Mr. Rumburg was president and founder of The Verity Group, an international management consulting firm specializing in IT benchmarking. While at Verity, Mr. Rumburg launched a number of syndicated benchmarking services that provided low cost benchmarks to more than 1,000 corporations worldwide. Mr. Rumburg has also held a number of executive positions at META Group, and Gartner. As a vice president at Gartner, Mr. Rumburg led a project team that reengineered Gartner’s global benchmarking product suite. And as vice president at META Group, Mr. Rumburg’s career was focused on business and product development for IT benchmarking.
Mr. Rumburg’s education includes an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, an M.S. magna cum laude in Operations Research from Stanford University, and a B.S. magna cum laude in Mechanical Engineering. He is author of A Hands-On Guide to Competitive Benchmarking: The Path to Continuous Quality and Productivity Improvement, and has taught graduate-level engineering and business courses.

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About Metricnet

MetricNet is dedicated to helping business people worldwide manage their organizations more efficiently and effectively. By providing benchmarks, performance metrics, scorecards and business data to Information Technology and Call Center Professionals..[+]

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Like any good business decision, benchmarking should be undertaken with the expectation that it will produce a positive ROI. Thankfully, it is relatively easy to make the business case for benchmarking, and as a veteran of more than 4,000 IT service and support benchmarks, I have plenty of data to back that claim up. The ROI of benchmarking includes both hard benefits, such as cost savings and improved user productivity, as well as soft benefits such as improved customer satisfaction.. Learn MorePlace article copy here. Be sure to make the articles short and concise as people tend not to read much more than a couple of paragraphs.

The ROI of Benchmarking Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the most common and important measures of financial performance in the business world. It is the ultimate measure of success for any business. Most companies, business units, and departments track ROI on an ongoing basis, and use this metric not only to make intelligent business decisions, but to justify their very existence.

Like any good business decision, benchmarking should be undertaken with the expectation that it will produce a positive ROI. Thankfully, it is relatively easy to make the business case for benchmarking, and as a veteran of more than 4,000 IT service and support benchmarks, I have plenty of data to back that claim up. The ROI of benchmarking includes both hard benefits, such as cost savings and improved user productivity, as well as soft benefits such as improved customer satisfaction.